RAIMONDO BOREA PHOTOGRAPH APPEARS IN DARREN NEWBURY'S BOOK "COLD WAR PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPLOMACY"

“AFRICAN STUDENTS AT FRIENDS WORLD COLLEGE”, AUGUST 9, 1963, BY RAIMONDO BOREA. © THE ESTATE OF RAIMONDO BOREA, COURTESY GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

THE COVER OF DARREN NEWBURY’S COLD WAR PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPLOMACY (2024).

Raimondo Borea’s photograph "African students at Friends World College”, taken on August 9th, 1963, appears on page 192 in Darren Newbury’s book COLD WAR PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPLOMACY, published in 2024 by Pennsylvania State University Press. Newbury’s book chronicles the United States’ “campaign of photographic diplomacy, underpinned by a faith in the capacity of the medium to cross cultural boundaries” in the wake of the “emergence of newly independent African nations onto the world state in the mid-twentieth century,” a development that “precipitated a contest for influence among Cold War superpowers.” As noted in Newbury’s book, regarding Borea’s photo:

Photographs of positive interactions between Black Africans and White Americans were highly valued. USIA commissioned a photographer to document African students at an experimental educational initiative by the Friends World College Committee in Long Island for a planned center-page spread in Outlook. The curriculum included topics such as disarmament, colonialims, and world education, but the emphasis of the photographic coverage was on the informal interactions between participans. Among the photographs selected from printing was one of an interracial couple holding hands as they wade in the shallow end of a swimming pool, an image with a very particular resonance in relation to desegregation struggles.

GME represents the work of photographer Raimondo Borea (b. 1926—d. 1982). Over a 40-year career of active photography, Borea amassed an impressive body of photographs. During that time he had exclusive access to the television broadcasts Firing Line, The Today Show, and The Tonight Show, where he captured candid portraits of the show’s hosts, guests, and behind-the-scenes activities. GME has completed a major undertaking to document, catalogue, and digitize a premier selection of his archive.